GoDaddy named chief operating officer Scott Wagner its new CEO on Tuesday, announcing that current CEO Blake Irving would retire at the end of this year.
Irving will remain on the board through June 2018, the company said.
GoDaddy made headlines last week after it decided to cancel the registration of a website called Daily Stormer, which had been associated with a white supremacist rally in Virginia that resulted in one death. After GoDaddy’s decision, Google also followed suit and kicked off the site.
“We always have to ride the fence on making sure we are protecting a free and open internet. And regardless of whether speech is hateful, bigoted, racist, ignorant, tasteless, in many cases we will still keep that content up because we don’t want to be a censor and First Amendment rights matter not just in speech but on the internet as well,” Irving said on “Squawk Alley.”
“But when the line gets crossed. And that speech starts to incite violence then we have a responsibility to take that down,” he added.
— CNBC’s Matthew Belvedere and Reuters contributed to this report.